© John Logie Baird Centre 2005. All rights reserved
Strong men: three forms of the magus in the films of Powell and Pressburger
Professor in Film Studies at De Montfort University and is author of British Cinema and the Second World War (Continuum, 2000) and other books on British cinema
One of the distinctive features of Powell and Pressburger's films is their deployment of enigmatic and powerful men. This is apparent in their films with Conrad Veidt (The Spy in Black and Contraband) and David Farrar (Black Narcissus, The Small Back Room and Gone to Earth), but is most remarkable in A Canterbury Tale, A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes, where the characters played by Eric Portman, Roger Livesey and Anton Walbrook assume a magus-like resonance. In all three films these are men who act like gods but still have fallible human attributes. Their presence seems integral to Powell and Pressburger's view of the world as exciting and dangerous but essentially benign. Unlike more familiar representations of strong men, they function less as a means of dominating and controlling women than as guides who offer resourceful men and women a path towards enlightenment and fulfilment. This essay explores the fusion of English mysticism and European masonic traditions with which Powell and Pressburger's films are imbued, and charts the roles played by powerful magus figures in these three key films.